You usually heard it before you saw it — a low grinding sound slapped rapidly by a hammer — and then you saw through the falling snow the dull waxy glow of the headlights like a hungry insect’s eyes, and gradually the beast itself emerged from behind shuddering white waves, a tangle of thighbones and plates of steel with six huge black corrugated tires munching implacably along the road.
Stuck up inside the canvas cab like a telephone repairman perched on a pole, Wade hunkered over the steel steering wheel and shoved the gears and the blade-control levers back and forth, fitting the rigid unwieldy machine to the dips and bends and bone-rattling frost heaves in the old badly maintained roads that ran along the river and crisscrossed the valley and the surrounding hills.
The chilled meat of his body had quickly thickened with numbness; his feet against the metal pedals were soon as cold as ingots; his gloved hands were stiff as monkey wrenches. He knew nothing of what had happened up on Parker Mountain this morning, nothing of anything beyond the immediate range of his body’s diminishing senses, and he stared out the plexiglass square at the white road before him, and he dreamed.
As far back as he could remember, certainly as far back as I can remember, Wade was called a dreamer, but only by those who knew him well and had known him for a long time — our mother and father, our sister and us three brothers, and his ex-wife Lillian too, and lately Margie Fogg, good old Margie Fogg. We all thought of Wade as a dreamer. Most people saw him as tense, quick, unpredictable and hot-tempered, and indeed he was all those things too. But since childhood, he seemed, when he was alone or imagined that he was alone, sometimes almost to let go of consciousness and float on waves of thought and feeling of his own making. They were not fantasies, exactly, for they had no narrative and little structure, and not memories or wishes, but warm streams of dumb contentment that flowed steadily through his mind and remained nonetheless safely outside of time, as if they had no source and no end.
A country boy and the third child in a taciturn family that left children early to their own devices, as if there were nothing coming in adult life worth preparing them for, Wade from infancy had found himself, often and for long periods of time, essentially alone. Whether in our mother’s company in the warm food-smelling kitchen or at night in his crib with his older brothers in the unheated upstairs bedroom where all three boys slept, he was generally ignored, treated like a piece of inherited furniture that had no particular use or value but might turn out someday to be worth something. Before long, he began to be discovered suddenly underfoot, noticed one morning or early afternoon when his older brothers were in school by our mother on her way out of the kitchen — a small boy seated silently in a corner facing the wall open-eyed as if studying the pattern in the wallpaper, until she scooped him up and held him tightly and, smiling down into his small dark somber face, said, “Wade, honey, you are my dreamer.”
He squirmed and hardened his body until it became difficult to hold, and when she put him down again, he ran out of the room ahead of her, letting the screened door slam behind him, and went in search of his brothers, standing by the side of the dirt road and waiting for the school bus to ease up to the house and let the two older boys out.
Behind him, our mother brushed aside the curtain and peered out the kitchen window at him and saw that once again the boy had the dreaming look on his face — impassive, enduring, unworried and unfocused. Our mother’s name was Sally, and she was pregnant then with Lena, her fourth child, and I was not born yet. Sally was barely thirty years old, and her husband, Glenn, our father, was a turbulent man who drank heavily, and though Glenn loved Sally, he beat her from time to time and had beaten the boys — not Wade, of course, he was still too young, but the older boys, Elbourne and Charlie, who could be provoking at times, even she had to admit it, especially when Glenn came home late on a Friday night and had been drinking and was truculent, though of course there was no excuse for beating her or the boys, none whatsoever, so Glenn was always sorry afterwards.
Consequently, when Sally watched her third son dream, she chose to believe that it was a sign of his blessed contentment and felt relieved that at least someone in this poor and troubled family was a happy person, and for that reason she thought of him as her favorite child. She believed that he was not like his father and, because he was a boy, not like her, either. When she gave birth to a boy she could barely believe that it had come from her body. Her fourth child would be a daughter, Lena, in whom Sally would see herself recreated wholly, poor thing. That is what she called her, “poor thing.” Then a year later, her fifth child would be born, a son they would name Rolfe, who Sally at first thought was like the first two, another chip off the old block, as Glenn said: and so for a few years he was — independent, troublesome, violent, male. Later, with excruciating difficulty, he would change, but no one in the family knew that, except possibly Wade.
The family lived from the start in an inherited house, Sally’s uncle’s place, a small run-down Cape farmhouse on 125 acres of rocky overgrown scrub four miles west of the center of Lawford on the north slope of Parker Mountain. Sally and Glenn moved into the place right after they were married, ostensibly in order to take care of her sick and long-widowed childless uncle Elbourne, but in reality they moved in because they had no other place to live and Sally was already pregnant. By the time Glenn declared that the name of his firstborn son was going to be Elbourne, he had already talked the crippled increasingly senile old man into putting the house in his and Sally’s name — in exchange for payment of three years’ back taxes, Glenn explained, and for safety’s sake. When, a year later, Uncle Elbourne died in his bed in the cold urine-smelling downstairs bedroom, Glenn and Sally Whitehouse were able to believe that they had made the old man’s final days cheerful, a belief backed now by the name of their firstborn son and by their legal ownership of the house.
From such circumspect beginnings, then, did the ramshackle old farm come eventually to be known as the White-house place, where we five Whitehouse kids were raised, where we argued and fought and suffered together and in our own gnarled fashion loved one another, the place that, finally, as soon as we were able, all five children fled — Elbourne and Charlie running to Vietnam, where they died, Lena to marriage with the Wonder Bread truck driver and obesity and charismatic Christianity and five squabbling children of her own, and I, Rolfe, whom the others regarded as the successful one, to the state university.
Wade, the dreamer, fled the Whitehouse place first for the young tenderhearted and beautiful Lillian Pittman; and a few years later, believing he was running from his marriage, he tried to follow his brothers and got sent to Korea instead; then he fled back to Lillian; and a few years after that, believing again that he was in flight from his marriage, he arrived at his trailer by Lake Minuit, Toby’s Inn, Margie Fogg, his job with LaRiviere, his love of his daughter Jill.
Meanwhile, our father, Glenn Whitehouse, was forced to retire early, at sixty-three, when the Littleton Coats mill was sold, and he and our mother remained out there alone in the old Cape, which we children regarded with dark suspicion and rarely visited, especially not on holidays. The old couple grew slowly silent, passing whole long days and nights without saying a word to one another, Ma knitting afghans for Lena’s children down in Revere and church bazaars here in town, Pop cutting and stacking wood for the winter, drinking steadily from midmorning until he fell asleep in his chair in front of the flickering eye of the television.